Throughout this six-week-long project, the class has used our Portrait of a Graduate trait of communication to do various things. We conducted interviews, listened, and asked questions to six guest speakers, and we emailed veterans follow-up questions after the interviews when we needed more information. We communicated with each other when we needed to find more info, pull from sources, brainstorm in groups, analyzing documents/ artifacts, and more. 

Collaboration was used to conduct interviews, talk with guest speakers, and brainstorm. We had to talk with each other and make sure everyone was on the same page. We wanted this to show respect to every veteran we interviewed and any other military service men and women. When it came time to create the website we had to really work together as a team to put things in and make sure all the information was there that was needed.  

We had to be extra creative in order to make the project come together smoothly. We had to brainstorm things out of the box. We also have to get creative when developing interview questions. When finding pictures of veterans that didn't grow up in Laconia we had to find alternative ways to get a picture of them.  

Throughout this project we had to problem-solve and find solutions to any problems that we most likely didn't anticipate to happen. While working as a class to create and format the website we had problems figuring out how to add pictures and make everything work out right, but we had to push through and figure out how to solve that problem. Another way we had to problem solve was when we were conducting interviews at the Taylor Community, we were expecting and anticipating a certain amount of veterans and when we got there we got surprised with some extra veterans that were interested in talking with us. Because of this it made some of our interviews shorter so we would be able to get everyone's story told, missing some students on this day also made it difficult but we solved the problem and managed to interview all the veterans.

This project made us as a class work on our own and make us improve our self-direction skills. We demonstrated self-direction by working on our own sometimes and most of the time in smaller groups each tackling a different part of the project. Each and every day as a class we would set goals to make progress on during the workshop time and try to complete what was needed to be done. At the end of our class we would reflect on our class day to ensure that we were making good progress and directing ourselves to get better and be more productive every day. 

As a class, we demonstrated perseverance when working through this project because there were a couple factors that either limited our work time or limited the information we were able to obtain. Right in the middle of this project we had our School vacation and that was a week off and away from the project, so being able to come back the following week and jump right back into the project was a little tough because our minds needed to be refreshed on what we learned during the interviews. Another thing we struggled with that we had to persevere through was attendance of students and sports interfering with the class time due to having to leave school early for away games.